[Paraview] documentation

[Utkarsh Ayachit]

Ken,

We totally understand your frustration. For this very reason, we have
started working on an online version of a user's guide for ParaView
which will be freely available. With every release of ParaView we will
package a pdf file which will serve as the manual for that release.

You can look at the current state of this document at
http://paraview.org/Wiki/ParaView/Users_Guide/Table_Of_Contents. It's
still under development, but we plan to have most of the sections
filled in by ParaView 3.10 release.

Utkarsh

On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 2:54 PM, Ken Olum <kdo at cosmos.phy.tufts.edu> wrote:
> Thanks for the quick answer to my question about installing macros.
>
> I'm writing now because I'm very unhappy about the state of the
> documentation.  Let me say that paraview is a great program and it
> enables me to make beautiful visualizations.  So I am reluctant to
> criticize the developers, but it really is remarkably difficult to
> learn to use.  It's bad enough that I'm seriously considering
> abandoning paraview and using something else.
>
> I hope that you would like to have a product that new users can learn
> to use without too much frustration, so let me go through my recent
> experiences to show why I'm so frustrated.
>
> I would like to display stereoscopic images.  So I looked in the
> Paraview Guide for any mention of stereoscopic display.  It isn't
> there.  I tried the online help, but there is no index, so I can't
> search for it.  I tried various help topics, but didn't find anything
> relevant.
>
> So I went to the net.  I couldn't find any documentation for stereo,
> but at least there is some archived discussion, so I learned that
> there is a "--stereo" command line switch.  So far so good, but how
> can I control how it renders the stereo?  I got a list of commandline
> options, and there is a set of modes.  But what are they?  What do the
> options mean?  I have access to a "visualization wall" which sends
> side-by-side display of the stereo frames to overlapping
> super-anaglyph projectors.  Can I use it?  How?
>
> And what about turning it on or off dynamically?  There doesn't seem
> to be any control of it once paraview is running.  But I managed to
> learn, again by looking through the archived messages to this list,
> that the stereo selection is an option of the viewer, and I was able
> to turn it on and off using the python shell.  Excellent!
>
> So then I thought, "Can I make this into something I can click on?"  I
> see that there is a "Macros" tab, and a macro is just what I want.
> Back to the online help.  No mention of macros.  Back to the book.  No
> mention of macros there either.  I didn't mind paying $80 for this
> book, since the software is free, but at least I thought for $80 it
> would answer my questions.
>
> OK.  Back to the net.  Aha.  There is a Wiki page on "Python GUI
> Tools".  The first topic is Macros.  What does it say?  "The
> management of macros is done inside the Macros menu".  Click on
> "Macros".  The only item is "<empty>".  Oops.
>
> What does it say next?  "Macros allow the user to define a Python
> script as built-in actions that become accessible from the Macros menu
> or directly inside the Toolbar."  Just what I want!  Great!  But how
> do I do it?  "Once a local file is defined as a Macro the given file
> is copied inside the user specific ParaView directory."  OK, but HOW
> do I define a local file as a Macro?  Nothing further is mentioned in
> this file.
>
> So I posted to this list, and right away I got an answer.  Thanks!
> That's great, but should I really just post my question here first?
> It seems I ought to try to answer my questions before bothering
> everyone, but I'm not having much success.
>
> In any case, while the answer (from Sebastien Jourdain) answered my
> question perfectly, he also said "We recently changed the Macro menu
> and the way that macros are managed.  The wiki explains the new way."
> Does it?  All I could see was what I quoted above, which does not
> include any mention of how to define a macro.  Maybe if I actually had
> the new version it would be obvious, but I certainly couldn't figure
> it out from this file.
>
> Anyway, shouldn't the documentation correspond to the latest version
> that one can download from the download site?  Or, at least, shouldn't
> it say that it corresponds to a later version and make it easy for me
> to find the documentation corresponding to the version I have?
>
> Again, I'm sorry to be so critical (and so verbose), but I beg you to
> consider the plight of new users and make things not so frustrating.
>
>                                        Ken
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